Introduction, Specifications and Architecture Summary

Introduction

In March NVIDIA introduced a new line of GPUs know as the 7900 series. The 7900 GTX was the new flagship graphics card and the 7900 GT was just a step below it, offering a lower price and slightly lower clock speeds. You can read our entire preview of the set of cards right here, but the short of it is that NVIDIA had a process technology shrink to 90nm and made some slight tweaks to the core. We recently reviewed the BFG 7900 GTX OC cards but this time we are taking a look at the 7900 GT OC model for users with slightly less cash to build their gaming system.

Architecture Overview

As I mentioned above, the architecture behind the 7900 GT is mostly unchanged from the 7900 GTX.

The basic architecture remains the same, with 24 pixel shader pipes, 8 vertex shader pipes and 16 ROPs. The main instigator behind the G71 is a move to the 90nm process technology which allowed them to shrink the die significantly over the 110nm G70 core. The G71 measures at about 196 mm^2 while the ATI R580 is a whopping 315 mm^2, both being manufactured at 90nm! At the very least NVIDIA is going to be making many more of these per wafer than ATI will be able to, which means lower costs, as long as a solid yield holds up.

We'll see today how well the BFG 7900 GT OC holds up to the reference platform that NVIDIA provided us with in March.